Content Details
Social Impacts of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill on Coastal Communities Along the US Gulf of Mexico
- Branch
- Executive
- Category
- Executive Agency Publications
- SuDoc Class Number
- I 72.
- Government Author
- Interior Department, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
- Personal Author
- Austin DE;Luchetta J;Phaneuf VM;Simms J
- Series Title
- BOEM Environmental Studies
- Publication Title
- Social Impacts of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill on Coastal Communities Along the US Gulf of Mexico
- Date Issued
- 2022
- Subject
- Socio-economic and Infrastructure
Vulnerable Coastal Communities
Deepwater Horizon; BP oil spill; Macondo blowout
- Obligation Number
- M12AC00010
- Geographic Scope
- Gulf of Mexico
- Report Number
- BOEM 2022-021
- CSE Reference
- Austin DE, Luchetta J, Phaneuf VM, Simms J (University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ). 2022. Social impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on coastal communities along the US Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans (LA): US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. 4 p. Obligation No.: M12AC00010. Report No.: OCS Study BOEM 2022-021. URL: https://espis.boem.gov/Technical%20Summaries/BOEM_2022-021.pdf
- Abstract
- The Deepwater Horizon disaster began on April 20, 2010 with the blowout of the Macondo well in the US Gulf of Mexico, over 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in coastal communities of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, this study explores the mid-range social effects of the Deepwater Horizon disaster from January 2013 through early 2016. It follows an earlier BOEM social impacts study that focused on the period April 2010–April 2012. This research documents how the social effects of the Deepwater Horizon disaster persisted throughout the study period, were differential across time and space, resisted quantification, and were expected to last well beyond the end of the study period. Many of the effects reported in the earlier period were still evident, layered upon storms, ongoing environmental change and coastal land loss, an economic downturn, a significant decline in the price of oil, a struggling seafood industry, and shifting demographics in coastal communities. Corresponding to each community’s unique combination of demographic, economic, and sociocultural factors, the effects in each place were different. Attempts to quantify socioeconomic effects that obscured differential impacts of the disaster, and observers who did not understand or portray this diversity of impacts, exacerbated social effects for those still experiencing them as some residents and leaders declared the disaster and its effects to be over. Contributing to the chaos, research and funding, became a significant source of ongoing effects related to the oil disaster and are expected to continue into the future. The report concludes that, across the study region, social effects stemming from cumulative and differential impacts of the disaster and from continuing uncertainty persisted into early 2016 and were expected to continue into the future.